The recipients are, for the most part, unaware of the individuals paying.
They are idols, actors, musicians, athletes, streamers, anime characters. Some of them are not people at all.
The money moves anyway, in enormous quantity, from millions of individuals who will never be recognised by the person they are supporting.
The Japanese word for this is oshi-katsu. Roughly: the activity of supporting your oshi, the one you have chosen.
I have worked as a counsellor for about forty years and taught at Japanese universities for most of that time.
I want to write about this because the English-language explanations I have read treat it as a curiosity — Japan’s strange fan culture — and I do not think that is what it is.
The number
Estimates vary depending on who is counting and how, so take the range rather than any single figure.
One industry survey put the market at around ¥4.1 trillion as of January 2026 — somewhere near $27 billion.
An earlier round of the same survey estimated ¥3.5 trillion for 2024, with about 13.8 million people taking part.
A separate 2026 survey of a thousand people arrived at a similar total and found roughly three in ten doing some form of it.
Average annual spending is reported at around ¥210,000.
But that average deserves suspicion: the same body of research finds that over 70% of participants spend less than ¥10,000 a month.
So the mean is being dragged upward by a committed minority, and most people doing this are spending modest amounts.
Here is the figure that actually matters.
Japan has had several years of rising prices and stagnant wages.
Households have cut back. And yet roughly half of surveyed fans said they had never once reduced their oshi-katsu spending.
Not reduced. Not once.
People are cutting groceries before they cut this. That tells you it is not being treated as entertainment.
The government has noticed
This is where it stops being a subculture story.
Japan’s Ministry of Finance has published a column treating oshi-katsu as an economic trend worth analysing.
The interesting part is not that the state noticed the money. It is what the column says about the psychology.
It notes that the forms of spending characteristic of oshi-katsu — tipping streamers, monthly membership support — resemble charitable giving, and that the satisfaction they produce appears to rest on altruism.
It goes on to suggest this may have positive effects on wellbeing.
A finance ministry document, describing fan spending as an altruistic act with mental health implications. I am not aware of an equivalent anywhere else.
It is not what “otaku” means here
The word travels, but its temperature does not. In English, otaku is close to neutral — people apply it to themselves without much hesitation. In Japanese it has historically carried more weight than that, and not the flattering kind.
Either way, neither version describes the people spending this money.
The demographics run across ages and genders…
If you have encountered Japanese fan culture in English, you probably have a mental image: young, male, obsessive, socially isolated.
Discard it.
The demographics run across ages and genders.
Reported monthly spending among Takarazuka Revue fans — Takarazuka being an all-female musical theatre company with an audience skewing heavily female and heavily middle-aged — averages around ¥14,800. That is one of the highest figures in the data.
Middle-aged women are among the most committed participants in this economy.
On my own campus I watch students do it, and I have watched colleagues my own age do it. It has stopped being a marker of any particular kind of person.
Why the asymmetry is the point
Now the part I actually want to say.
In English this gets filed under parasocial relationships, usually with a note of concern attached. I want to make a different argument.
The standard explanation for fan spending is that people want to feel close to someone admired. That is true, but it is not the mechanism. The mechanism is the direction of the relationship.
Your oshi does not know you exist.
This is usually presented as the sad part. I think it is the functional part.
Consider what a relationship with a person who does know you exist requires. They can be disappointed in you. They can withdraw. They can need something from you on a day when you have nothing. They can misunderstand what you meant. Every close relationship carries a running cost, and that cost is paid in the currency of being seen.
An oshi cannot reject you, because there is nothing to reject. The affection runs one way, and it runs on your schedule. You can stop for a month and nothing has been damaged. You can give more than you can afford and nobody asks you to justify it.
And it is not passive. This is where the ministry’s altruism observation lands. You buy the album, you stream the song, you vote, you show up — and the numbers move.
The support is real even though the relationship is not. You get to be materially useful to someone without ever having to be visible to them.
For someone who is exhausted by being needed at work and needed at home, that combination is very specific and very hard to find anywhere else.
Where the line actually falls
I am not going to write that oshi-katsu is simply healthy. That would be the easy version and I do not believe it.
But the line does not fall where people assume. The usual worry is about intensity — how much they spend, how much they think about it. Intensity is a poor indicator on its own.
The question I would ask is a different one: does it return you to your life, or replace it?
Someone who works through a difficult week because there is a concert on Saturday is using this well. The oshi is functioning as an anchor to the ordinary world, not an exit from it.
Someone who is spending money they need, missing obligations, and finding that the rest of life has quietly emptied out is in a different situation — and it is rarely the fandom that caused it. When something asymmetric expands to fill a life, it is usually because the symmetric relationships gave way first. Attacking the fandom in that case removes the last functioning thing.
The most common failure I see is not excess. It is embarrassment. People conceal this from their families, decide it is undignified at their age, and give up something that was doing real work for them.
The same shape, three times
I have now written three pieces about things currently happening in Japan, and they turn out to describe one pattern.
Chiikawa is a character who fails, works, and gets frightened, and whom readers place beside themselves rather than above. Nui-katsu is carrying a soft object that asks nothing of you and lowers your stress hormones without your noticing. Oshi-katsu is directing genuine care toward someone who cannot direct any back.
An object. A story. A person who does not know you.
Three enormous markets, all supplying attachment that carries no risk of being hurt by it.
I do not think Japan is unusual in wanting that. I think Japan happens to have built the infrastructure first, and is therefore easier to observe.
Whether that is a symptom or a solution, I genuinely do not know. But it is worth watching, because on current evidence it is not staying here.
Figures cited are from Japanese industry surveys published between 2025 and early 2026; different bodies count the market differently, and I have given ranges where they disagree.
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